Browsing by Subject "tutkimusjohtaminen"

Research leadership and practices of doctoral training play an important role in developing universities' research efficiency. However, only few resources are traditionally allocated within universities to promote research leadership. In addition a significant number of doctoral students never finish their thesis. Despite their importance, scientific literature concerning research leadership and practices of doctoral training as well as their connection to research outcomes and quality remains limited. The aim of this study was to investigate how leadership was organised and what kind of practices of doctoral training could be found in researcher communities operating within University of Helsinki. Furthermore, this study explored how organisation of leadership and practices of doctoral training were related to the researcher communities' research outcomes and quality. This study was based on an international evaluation of research and doctoral training in University of Helsinki in 2010–2012. Altogether 136 voluntarily attending researcher communities took part in the survey. The data were collected through a survey which consisted open ended questions related to the communities' leadership and practices of doctoral training. The leadership and practices of doctoral training appearing in the communities were analysed using qualitative content analysis. The relation leadership and practices of doctoral training had to the communities' research outcomes and quality were measured using statistical chi-squared test. The results showed that leadership in the researcher communities' was either distributed or centralised in structure and it was either formally or informally organised. In addition, the communities utilised either community based or individual based practices in their doctoral training. The distributed and formally led researcher communities received better research outcomes than the centralised and informally led communities. Furthermore, the communities that favoured community based practices in their doctoral training received better research outcomes than the ones utilising individual based practices. The results indicate that distributed leadership and community based practices of doctoral training should be taken more in to account in developing research and doctoral training.